Baton Rouge woman sues Apple claiming iPhone 4s exploded in her pants

An East Baton Rouge Parish resident is suing technology giant Apple, claiming an iPhone spontaneously combusted in her pocket, burning a hole through her pants to her leg.

Amy Langlois DeOliveira filed a personal injury lawsuit with the Middle District of Louisiana on April 22 against the Silicon Valley-based company, alleging that last summer her iPhone 4s exploded in her pants and burned her leg.

DeOliveira is seeking $75,000 in damages, which include medical expenses, pain, suffering, mental anguish, physical disfigurement, impairment, the value of the iPhone 4s and the clothing that was burned.

Her attorney, Gregory Aycock of the Aycock Law Firm in Baton Rouge, filed a summons with Apple through its locally registered agent, CT Corporation, on April 23, according to court documents. The company has 21 days from that date to reply to the summons. Failure to do so will result in a judgement being entered against the company, with the court awarding DeOliveira the amount she is seeking.

Though the incident allegedly happened in 2013, DeOliveira, according to the complaint, purchased the white iPhone 4s on Nov. 26, 2011 from the Best Buy on Bluebonnet Boulevard, near the Mall of Louisiana.

The problem occurred, according to filings, on Aug. 19, 2013 when DeOliveira placed the phone in her pants pocket shortly after removing it from a charger in her bedroom. About a minute later, the complaint says, "Ms. DeOliveira heard a loud pop and sizzle, instantly felt a burning sensation to her right leg, and saw smoke. Instantaneously, Ms. DeOliveira screamed and realized that the iPhone 4s had exploded in her pants pocket."

The complaint says smoke filled DeOliveira's kitchen and living room, causing her kitchen smoke alarm to go off. The explosion also melted the phone's protective case and "burned a hole in her pants and ultimately burned her leg," the complaint says, causing her to need emergency medical attention.

DeOliveira is asking for a trial by jury. Aycock declined to comment, saying, "I have a policy, I don't comment on pending litigation." Representatives from CT Corporation were not immediately available to comment Thursday (April 24).

Blind-drunk cop shot stranger 6 times: police

A city cop started his day with a little target practice at the
NYPD firing range — and ended it by getting blind drunk at a bar,
pulling out his gun and blasting a random stranger who had pulled up
next to him in a car, police sources said Wednesday.

NYPD Officer Brendan Cronin drove up to a stoplight just past the
city border in Pelham, Westchester, a bit before midnight Tuesday and
allegedly unloaded his boozy barrage at a passenger in another car.

He fired 13 shots, hitting the man six times, the sources said.

Cronin, 27, capped his night of misadventure by nearly getting
himself killed — allegedly pointing his Glock 9mm at officers who
stopped him after he fled the scene of the shooting.

Authorities said the trouble all began when Cronin downed numerous
drinks with some other cops at the end of a day that included a visit to
the NYPD firing range in The Bronx.

Investigators had no idea why the six-year veteran of the 46th
Precinct allegedly opened fire on Joe “The Truck” Felice, 47, who had
been heading home with a pal after playing in a recreational hockey
game.

Cronin was so drunk, he did not even remember firing his weapon, the
sources said. “We have not been able to find any link between the two
persons,” said Pelham Police Chief Joseph Benefico. “We have nothing to
link either party to each other — no road rage, nothing.”

Benefico said Cronin waved his gun out of his car’s window and began
firing while stopped at a light at the intersection of Lincoln and Sixth
avenues.

After the shooting, Cronin — who had apparently been heading to his
Yonkers home — allegedly sped away. Someone who called 911 said the
shooter’s car’s hazard lights were flashing.

This made it easy for Pelham officers to track the drunk cop, and
they stopped Cronin a half-mile away in New Rochelle. After nearly
getting himself shot in the ensuing standoff, when he allegedly pointed
his gun out the window, he eventually gave up, tossing out his car keys.
He was arrested and charged with assault.

Felice told police he heard the gunshots while sitting at a traffic
light in the passenger seat, a source said. After realizing he had been
shot, Felice slumped down and was struck five more times.

After the fusillade of gunfire, Felice looked up and noticed a bullet
hole in the headrest he had been using moments before, the source said.

The victim was rushed to Montefiore Medical Center in The Bronx,
where he was in stable condition Wednesday. He suffered wounds to his
lungs, arms and torso, sources said. One shot barely missed his head.

The Westchester shooting wasn’t the only incident of an NYPD officer getting drunk and firing at a car.

Sgt. Wanda Anthony fired at a woman’s car during a domestic dispute
in Wat­chung, NJ, around 3:30 a.m. Wednesday, sources said. There were
no injuries. Anthony has been suspended without pay and charged with
DWI.

Tuesday night’s Pelham shooting also comes on the heels of an
incident in which an on-duty and drunken officer allegedly shot his
partner by accident after they had drinks at a Howard Beach diner.

“We’re very concerned with a number of reports,” Police Commissioner
Bill Bratton said. “I, personally, am very disturbed about the number of
incidents in recent weeks that are part of a longer-term problem of
inappropriate use of alcohol by members of our department.”

Mother prayed over her son as he died in Lower 9th Ward shooting

Yamoni Kinebrew, a Lower 9th Ward native, had plans to move to Metairie with her 21-year-old son and his baby daughter to escape bad influences on young men and violence in New Orleans.

Just a few weeks ago, the family returned to the city from Alexandria, where they lived after Hurricane Katrina. For the time being, they were staying in the 9th Ward with family.

Kinebrew was on her way to the suburbs to look for a home Saturday around 11:15 a.m. when she received a phone call saying her son, Rashad,had been shot. She rushed over to the corner of Marais and Lizardi streets, where Rashad was laying face-up, blood spilling from his mouth.

"A girl was fanning him, and she said he was still breathing," Kinebrew said between tears. "I started praying over him. I felt his neck and wrist. He didn't have a pulse. I continued praying. I told him God was in control. I told him I loved him. I asked him to come back to me and stay strong, but he was already gone."

Paramedics arrived. One of them told Kinebrew her son was dead.

"I let out one big scream," she said. "And then that's it. There's nothing I can do to bring him back."

A neighbor said she heard about seven shots fired in rapid succession. New Orleans police laid at least 22 cones marking bullet casings and other evidence in the street and on a nearby basketball court.

Police said they found a handgun beneath the victim's body.

While police did not name any suspects or motives, the victim's aunt, Dwanda Kinebrew, said she had heard from witnesses that the slaying was driven by an ongoing feud between two groups of young men. Rashad hung out with one of the groups, she said, but he was not a member of it.

He was aware of the consequences of street violence, his mother said. In fact, on Saturday, he planned to attend the funeral of his friend, Charles Gilbert, 17, who was shot dead at a party on April 27.

"I always told him before he left the house, 'Make wise choices. Be the head, not the tail,'" Yamoni Kinebrew said.

Rashad Kinebrew's aunt, Linda Phillips, said she lost two sons to street violence on one day in 2007 in separate shootings across town from one another. "When your loved one gets killed, it's like somebody snatched them away," Phillips said. She said the question "why?" always lingers.

Rashad Kinebrew, who went by the nickname RaRa, was in school and working toward his GED. He hoped to get a job in Metairie, his mother said. He loved to spend time with his 1-year-old daughter, Sage.

Authorities ask anyone with information on this homicide to contact Detective Maggie Darling at 504.658.5300 or Crimestoppers at 504.822.1111.

A 15-year-old who survived being shot in the head last July by a Marigny homeowner was arrested Friday (May 2) in a residential burglary in the Marigny, according to two law enforcement officials. Marshall Coulter was shot last July by homeowner Merritt Landry, who later told police he believed the teen was breaking into his home.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the investigation.

They said Coulter was detained Friday afternoon by 8th District detectives after a resident in the 2000 block of Royal Street reported a burglary of their home. It was not immediately clear how police linked him to the crime.

New Orleans police spokesman Officer Frank Robertson III said officers detained a 15-year-old boy around 3:45 p.m. and booked him on a simple burglary charge. He said the investigation was ongoing and that no more information would be forthcoming. No court or jail records were available in the case.

The Coulter family could not immediately be reached. A former neighbor said they moved in recent months.

Coulter was left with serious injuries after the shooting, his family has said. Coulter was still undergoing surgeries, including the removal of part of his skull, in December, his mother told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune at the time. She said her son had trouble walking, talking and eating.

Landry was booked with attempted second-degree murder the day of the shooting, but has not been charged since. An Orleans Parish grand jury has been considering the polarizing Landry case, but has not returned an indictment. Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro has said he was taking his time with the racially-charged case. Coulter is black; Landry is white.

The July 26 shooting, which came on the heels of the not guilty verdict in the divisive George Zimmerman-Trayvon Martin case in Florida, touched off a firestorm of controversy in New Orleans. Opponents accused Landry of overreacting with deadly force; supporters said he had the right to defend himself and his family.

A building inspector for the Historic District Landmarks Commission, Landry, 33, told police he was home with his pregnant wife and 2-year-old daughter when he thought he heard the window shutters on his single-story shotgun rustle shortly before 2 a.m., a source close to Landry said. Landry told police that he confronted the teen in the driveway just a few feet from the house's backdoor.

Some people close to Landry said that he told them that he then yelled out, "Freeze! Get down!"

Police reports simply state that Landry told police that he saw the teen make a "move, as if to reach for something."

Police records state that Landry then shot Coulter from 30 feet away. A single bullet struck Coulter in the head. The teen was rushed to the hospital where he was listed as being in an induced coma for many weeks later.

Landry said he believed the teen was trying to break into his house, according to the arrest warrant.

Detectives, however, said that their investigation showed that Coulter, who was not armed, did not pose an "imminent threat" to Landry. Detectives also spoke with an unidentified witness whose account differed from Landry's, according to the arrest warrant.

Coulter's family has acknowledged the teen's history of burglary arrests. Family members at the time of the shooting said Coulter was awaiting trial but would not say what the charges were. Coulter's brother even went so far as to call his little brother a "professional thief," but said that he would never pick up a gun.

After deliberating almost 10 hours Thursday, a Jefferson Parish jury acquitted a Metairie man of the aggravated rape of a River Ridge girl whoaccused him of sexually abusing her over a four-year period, starting in the spring of 2006 when she was 11 years old.

However, the five women and seven men in the jury could not reach a verdict on whether Robert Bush committed the molestation of a juvenile, the second charge for which he stood trial this week. With the jury deadlocked, Judge Michael Mentz of the 24th Judicial District Courtdeclared a mistrial about 8 p.m.

That means Bush, 35, a mechanic who was acquainted with the girl and her family, is expected to stand trial again on the molestation charge, which carries a punishment of 25 years to 99 years in prison upon conviction. The district attorney's office would not elaborate on its plans in the case.

The girl's DNA was found on a condom he used, but Bush denied the accusations. He testified he sometimes used condoms when masturbating, in explaining the soiled sheaths the girl's family found in their backyard shed where she said Bush raped her.

He said he sometimes crawled into that attic to masturbate, in seeking privacy, on blankets he spread out. He asserted the girl once caught him in the act in explaining how she knew about his attic activities and the condoms. The girl, now 19, said he raped her on the blankets, among other places, and used condoms. Had he been convicted of aggravated rape, Bush would have spent the rest of his life in prison.

"We are pleased with the jury's verdict of not guilty as to the charge of aggravated rape, and commend the jury for its willingness to dispassionately evaluate the evidence presented by both sides in the context of such emotionally charged issues," his attorney Joseph Bartels said Friday.

"Our defense of Mr. Bush goes forward, and we are confident that the entire matter will ultimately be resolved in his favor," said Bartels, who represented Bush with his wife Victoria Bartels.

The girl reported abuse in March 2011, leading to a six-month investigation before the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office arrested Bush. Forensic scientists at the Sheriff's Office found the girl's skin cells, which matched her DNA, on the outside of one of the condoms.

Bush's DNA was also found on that condom. His attorneys argued that the girl, whose family handled the condoms before turning them over to the Sheriff's Office, must have planted the skin cells in an attempt to frame him in the midst of a dispute.

The prosecutors said the girl could not have extracted skins cells from the semen mixture on the condom, and then leave behind only her epithelial DNA. "That is scientifically impossible," Assistant District Attorney Clif Milner, who prosecuted the case with Shawanna McCarthy, told jurors in closing argument.

"Common sense and the science give you comfort in the corroboration of what she said," Milner said of the rape allegations.

The girl, whom NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune is not identifying, testified this week she met Bush in 2006, and in the months that followed, he began showing her pornography depicting sexual acts he wanted her to perform on her.

She accused Bush of having her perform the acts in his car, her homes and even in the Mississippi River batture, where they sometimes fished. The abusive acts escalated, and included rapes in the shed attic, she said.

Bush denied it all, and in attacking her credibility, he testified the girl once claimed to have been knocked out and raped on the river levee by a large black man but later said it was a bald white man. He said she was taken to a psychiatric hospital once, for trying to pull veins out of her arm using a safety pin.

She was suspended from her school for attacking another student, he said, and she once was caught shoplifting shoes from a discount clothing store. Prosecutors conceded the girl had a troubled history.

We admit her life was a train wreck." - Prosecutor Clif Milner, of troubled rape victim.

"We admit her life was a train wreck," Milner told the jury. He suggested that the girl's behavior might have been rooted in the sexual abuse, but that she also was "a confused child walking that path to adulthood."

He remains held in the parish jail in lieu of a $25,000 bond that had been set for the molestation charge when he was indicted in September 2011. Mentz canceled the $500,000 bond set on the aggravated rape charge.

Bush is scheduled to appear in court May 19, for a status hearing. Before his rape arrests, his only convictions were for misdemeanor marijuana and gun possession charges, from when he was 19 years old, he said.

The men are accused of killing 18-year-old Kenneth Young on Dec. 15 on a Gentilly street corner during a drug deal and then dumping his body in a woody area in Slidell.

Slidell police were notified of the killing after neighbors called to report a suspicious white car, which was seen parked in a wooded area on Teddy Avenue. There, police said, they found Young's body in the trunk of a bloodied white Infinity. He had been shot in the head several times, records show.

According to an NOPD detective's report, the killing stemmed from a marijuana deal.

Young, a senior at Landry-Walker High School in Algiers, was connected by phone records to Levy, who is Bartholomew's cousin, police said. Records show Levy told detectives that he had taken a group of men, including Bartholomew, to buy marijuana near the intersection of Peoples Avenue and Verbena street on the day of the teen's death.

Levy told police they parked next to a white car where two of the people got out and into the white car, the arrest warrant said.

Levy said he and Bartholomew remained in their car the entire time and heard muffled gun shots coming from the white car next to them, the report said. Levy told police he got scared then and drove away.

However, when police later interviewed Bartholomew, his story differed slightly from the version of his cousin's and he told police he knew of no shooting that had occurred that day.

A witness later told detectives that they had heard both Levy and Bartholomew admit to shooting Young and police also found surveillance footage taken from nearby the crime scene that showed Bartholomew, Levy and Braud in the area around the time of the murder.

Also, physical evidence was found inside Young's car that was linked to both Levy and Braud, records show.

Orleans Parish Criminal District Court Judge Camille Buras set a $1.6 million bond for each of the men.

Faculty members at Young's school remember the teen as an ambitious young man who they described as an "energetic and funny kid" who was intent on graduating in May.

After woman's heroin overdose, drug dealer faces murder charge

A New Orleans man is facing a second-degree charge after authorities say he sold heroin to aChalmette woman who died of a fatal overdose.

Merlin "Mitch" Smothers sold heroin to Brooke Megan Weiskopf, 26, on Dec. 22, 2012, in theLower 9th Ward, St. Bernard Sheriff's Chief Deputy Richard Baumy said on Friday. Weiskopf then went back to her residence onWest Chalmette Circle and ingested the dose of heroin there that ended up killing her, Baumy said.

Smothers, who in March was sentenced in New Orleans to five years in prison for selling heroin, is facing the murder charge under a law changed in 1987 -- during the crack cocaine epidemic -- allowing drug dealers to face murder charges even if the dealer lacked a specific intent to kill.

The charge carries a mandatory life sentence upon conviction, without the benefit of parole, probation, or suspension of sentence.

And as the Peralta grand jury hearing ran over its expected time slot, Cannizzaro waited there, sitting in the courthouse for several hours. At that time, all Cannizzaro would say about his presence there was that he was he was aiding in a hearing that was "multi-jurisdictional."

On Wednesday (April 30), the first hearing date for the Smothers' murder was set for June 23 in the Chalmette courthouse. Orleans Parish Assistant District Attorney Jason Napoli is prosecuting the case in front of St. Bernard Judge Perry Nicosia.

The FBI had begun monitoring Smothers' heroin dealing in the Lower 9th Ward through confidential informants beginning in August 2012, according to federal court records. Smothers mainly dealt the drugs near the corner of Burgundy Street and Forestall Street.

Smothers ended up pleading guilty in March to selling heroin in the Lower 9th Ward from at least August 2012 to April 2013, court records state.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) — A Memphis man is charged with killing his grandson in an argument that police say began because the younger man didn’t have dinner done on time.The Commercial Appeal (http://bit.ly/1kF4Jja) reports 63-year-old Harold Gray is charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of 31-year-old Anthony Morris.

According to a police report, Gray returned home from work on April 25 and got angry because Morris didn’t have dinner ready. Police say the men argued and Gray told officers Morris hit him in the face twice.Police say Morris went outside and Gray followed and stabbed him with a knife.Gray is being held at the Shelby County jail, where online records did not list an attorney for him.

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